LONELY AT THE TOP
Both Amazon and Netflix have been releasing football documentaries at a steady clip, seeking, understandably, to capitalise on the game’s global popularity. Naturally, they mostly focus on the game’s major brands, teams seemingly born to greatness (Juventus) and teams that have had greatness thrust upon them (Manchester City), even if the documentaries that result are hagiographies, too eager to further burnish the already over-burnished.
Last month, Amazon Prime released Make Us Dream, its documentary about Steven Gerrard, the iconic Liverpool footballer, captain of both club and country, who retired in 2016.
Born in 1980 in Huyton, a Liverpool suburb, Gerrard grew up in a city steeped in footballing glory. The triumphs of its famous clubs, Everton and Liverpool, were an antidote to industrial decline, a salve for a people who believed, with reason, that they were held in contempt and persecuted by Margaret Thatcher’s government. But Liverpool has not won the English league since 1990, having won it 11 times in the preceding 17 years. Unlike the Liverpool stars of the past, great players in even greater teams, Gerrard was a great player in an often middling team.
Of course, he’s had major successes. The biggest was dragging a prosaic Liverpool side to victory in the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’—the 2005 Champions League final in which they were 3-0 down at halftime to the strolling sophisticates of AC Milan. But he’s never won the league championship, what Bill Shankly, presiding deity of Liverpool football, called the club’s “bread and butter”. Gerrard is, as Make Us Dream shows, a working class hero made flesh from the pages of Boy’s Own Story. But that story, given Liverpool’s thirst to be league champions, is also one of failure. He wore the pressure on his face, lines etched across his forehead like stigmata, dragging the corners of his mouth into a perpetual moue of frustrated desire. Gerrard does not have the antic charisma of other Liverpool heroes, of John Lennon, say, or, sticking to football, Robbie Fowler. It was his willingness to bear the weight of his people’s yearning on his aching back that won him their love. But that love was smothering, even frightening. When it seemed certain Gerrard would leave the club to achieve his title ambitions, fans burned his shirt and howled anguished expletives on radio phone-ins.
He stayed a prisoner of his own persona. Make Us Dream, despite its best efforts, is not hagiography because Gerrard’s relationship to Liverpool is so rich with ambiguity. There is loyalty, for sure, but also some profound masochistic strain. How else to explain his decision to become manager of Rangers, swapping the frying pan of Liverpool, for the hissing, spitting cauldron of Glasgow?